Walk through any village in rural India during the sowing season and you will see a striking pattern. The fields are filled with women bending over rows of paddy, transplanting seedlings, weeding, or carrying loads of fodder. Yet when you ask “who is the farmer here,” the answer is almost always a man’s name. This contradiction sits at the heart of how globalization has reshaped Indian agriculture. As the country opened up its markets in the 1990s and integrated into the global trading system, women became more central to farm work than ever before, but their economic standing, land rights, and control over resources did not improve at the same pace. In many cases, things got harder.
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The shift to export-oriented agriculture
Liberalization in 1991 and India’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 1995 changed the priorities of Indian agriculture. Policy began nudging farmers away from staple food crops like jowar, bajra, and pulses and toward high-value cash crops meant for global markets: cotton, soybean, oilseeds, sugar, horticulture produce, and floriculture. The logic was simple, since cash crops promised higher returns and foreign exchange.
The reality on the ground has been more complicated. Cash-crop cultivation usually demands higher capital investment, hybrid seeds, chemical inputs, and irrigation. It also requires access to credit and market information. These are precisely the resources women farmers struggle to access. When a household shifts from subsistence farming to commercial cropping, decisions about what to grow, what inputs to use, and where to sell the produce typically move into the hands of men. A field study from rural Karnataka noted that while women exert control over kitchen gardens, men dominate decisions over larger, cash-crop farms. Women remain the workers, but stop being the deciders.
Displacement of women farmers and wage labourers
Export-oriented agriculture has also reshaped land use. Special Economic Zones, contract farming arrangements, plantation expansions, and large-scale land acquisition for industrial or commercial projects have pushed many small and marginal farmers off their land. Women bear the sharpest edge of this displacement because most do not have land titles in their name. The National Commission for Women has noted that women’s labour in agriculture is largely unrecorded or unaccounted for, leaving them an invisible workforce with no claim to compensation or rehabilitation when land is acquired.
For Adivasi women, the loss is doubled. They have historically been primary collectors of mahua flowers, honey, tendu leaves, and medicinal herbs from the forests, which they sold in local markets to earn an independent income. When forests are diverted for mining, plantations, or large infrastructure projects, this independent livelihood disappears. Many of these displaced women end up as casual wage labourers on someone else’s farm, in brick kilns, or in informal urban work, all at lower pay and with less security than what they had before.
Mechanization adds another layer of displacement. As farms move to tractors, threshers, and harvesters to meet the volume and uniformity demanded by export markets, the manual tasks that women traditionally performed (and were paid for) shrink. The tasks that remain, like weeding, transplanting, and post-harvest sorting, are the ones classified as “unskilled,” and they are the ones that pay the least.
The impact of subsidies and cheap imports
One of the most consequential outcomes of globalization for Indian farmers has been the asymmetry in agricultural subsidies between rich and poor countries. Under the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, developed countries continue to provide massive support to their farmers, while developing countries like India face tight caps on how much they can spend on price support and input subsidies for their own.
This imbalance is not a small accounting issue. The core problem is structural, since developed countries’ farmers receive heavy subsidized support, enabling them to price products below actual production costs. When India was forced to lift quantitative restrictions on agricultural imports by April 2001, the country was opened up to cheap, subsidized produce from countries that could undersell Indian farmers in their own market.
How dumping affects women’s livelihoods
The sectors hit hardest by cheap imports have been edible oils, pulses, dairy products, sugar, and cotton, and these are sectors where women’s labour is highly concentrated. Take edible oils. India imports a large share of its palm oil and soybean oil, undercutting local oilseed growers in states like Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan. When prices crash, the household income shrinks. Women, who do most of the labour-intensive work in oilseed cultivation, see their wages and bargaining power fall even further.
Cotton tells a similar story. Women dominate the labour force in cotton cultivation, particularly in cottonseed production and pollination work, which require patience and precision. According to estimates compiled in research on Indian agriculture, women’s participation rate is about 46.84% in cotton cultivation and 45.43% in oilseeds. When subsidized cotton from the United States or other major exporters depresses global prices, the burden of falling farm incomes is absorbed first by these women workers in the form of lower wages, longer hours, or simply less work available.
The same logic applies to dairy and poultry, where cheap imports from developed economies threaten the small-scale producers, many of whom are women running household-level operations. When local prices fall, women lose what was often their only direct source of cash income, the one they did not have to negotiate with male family members to access.
More work, less power
Globalization is often described as a process that integrates markets and creates opportunity. For women in Indian agriculture, it has produced a different pattern, which researchers now describe as the feminization of agriculture, where the share of women in farm work has risen sharply, but the rise reflects distress more than empowerment.
The numbers tell the story plainly. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the phenomenon of feminization of agriculture emerged in India after privatisation, but does not result in empowerment because female workers receive lower wages, face gender discrimination, lack access to modern technology, and have limited control over resources and markets. The Periodic Labour Force Survey 2024 also points to a rise in women’s work participation rate from 24.8% in 2017 to 42% in 2023, largely driven by a surge in self-employment that, in rural contexts, typically means unpaid work in family-run farms or enterprises.
The land ownership gap
The single most important resource in agriculture is land, and on this count the gap is striking. Editorial analysis of women farmers’ rights notes that women hold only about 12 to 14 percent of operational landholdings in India, since most agricultural land is registered in men’s names due to patrilineal inheritance practices. Without land titles, women cannot officially be recognized as farmers. They cannot access the Kisan Credit Card, formal bank loans, crop insurance, MSP procurement benefits, or most government schemes meant for cultivators. They do the farming, but the system does not see them as farmers.
The double burden
Globalization has not lightened the workload at home either. Women in rural India continue to carry almost the entire load of cooking, cleaning, childcare, fetching water and firewood, and caring for elders. When their farm responsibilities increase because of male outmigration, mechanization of “men’s tasks,” or the shift to labour-intensive cash crops, the result is a longer working day, not a redistribution of work.
Research on the feminization trend has argued that this growing contribution of labour can be better described as the feminization of agrarian distress, where women are pushed into agricultural employment because of the sector’s growing precarity, rather than because of new opportunities. Climate change, erratic monsoons, falling water tables, and the rising cost of seeds and fertilizers add to this pressure. When the household cannot afford hired labour, the work falls on the women of the family for free.
Farm suicides and the women left behind
There is one more dimension that often goes uncounted. When male farmers, crushed by debt from failed cash crops or by subsidized import competition, take their own lives, it is the widows who inherit the debt without inheriting the land titles or the social standing of “farmer.” They are left to raise children, repay moneylenders, and keep the farm running, often without any legal recognition. The National Commission for Women’s report on the impact of WTO observed that women bear the ultimate burden of farm suicides, since they are left to look after their households without assets but with the burden of indebtedness.
What changes would actually help
The picture is bleak, but it is not unchangeable. Three shifts could meaningfully alter the trajectory. First, recognition as farmers. The National Policy for Farmers, 2007, already defines a farmer based on the activity rather than land ownership, but its implementation on the ground is weak. Joint land titling, where both spouses are recorded as owners, has been tried in some states and could be scaled up. Second, access to credit and markets through women-led Farmer Producer Organizations, since collective bargaining gives small women cultivators a way around the disadvantages they face individually. Third, public policy that protects the food crops women have historically grown, like millets and pulses, from being squeezed out by cheap imports. The recognition of millets as a strategic crop and India’s push for the International Year of Millets is a small but useful step in this direction.
The deeper point is that globalization is not gender-neutral. The same trade policy can lift one set of workers while pushing another set deeper into invisible, unpaid, unprotected labour. For Indian agriculture, the question is no longer whether women are part of farming. They clearly are, and increasingly so. The question is whether they will be counted as farmers, paid as farmers, and treated as farmers in their own right.
What do you think? If women perform the majority of agricultural labour but own very little of the land, what kind of policy intervention do you believe would shift the balance most decisively? And how should India negotiate its position at the WTO so that protecting small women cultivators is not treated as a trade-distorting subsidy?
References
- https://india.mongabay.com/2025/06/farms-turn-femme-but-women-still-plough-through-power-centres/
- https://ncwapps.nic.in/pdfReports/Impact%20of%20WTO%20Women%20in%20Agriculture.pdf
- https://agriculture.institute/agribusiness-mgt-policies/wto-agreements-impact-indian-agriculture/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_agriculture_in_India
- https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1735159/
- https://www.nextias.com/ca/editorial-analysis/07-03-2026/women-farmers-rights-india
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9668104/
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